Zero To A Hundred – Episode 41: Turning Your Business Finances Into A Growth Engine With David Worrell

Accelerators! 🚀

Are your business finances helping you grow—or holding you back? This week, we sit down with David Worrell, partner at FuseCFO, to break down how to track financial health, manage cash flow, and create a roadmap for long-term success. With a track record of scaling and exiting multiple businesses, David shares key insights every entrepreneur needs to stay profitable and financially smart.

What’s on the Menu:

📊 How to use Simple Numbers to track financial health.

💰 Mastering cash flow and avoiding bad debt.

🔍 Why every business owner needs a financial dashboard—and what to put on it.

Why Tune In?

David has helped countless businesses streamline finances, improve cash flow, and make smarter investment decisions. Whether you’re a startup or a seasoned entrepreneur, this episode will change how you look at your business’s financial strategy and profitability.

💬 Gem from David:

“If you don’t track your financials, you’re flying blind—business success is in the numbers.”

Get in Touch with David:

📧 Email him at David@FuseCFO.com or visit FuseCFO.com for financial insights and consulting.

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred! 💥

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Turning Your Business Finances Into A Growth Engine With David Worrell

On the show, I’m very excited to introduce our guest, David Worrell, who is a partner and CFO of Fuse CFO, fractional CFO services. David has had an incredible career as an accomplished entrepreneur, analyst, and author of the Entrepreneur’s Guide to Financial Statements. Intuit named David to its prestigious list of 100 global influencers in accounting and finance. He has founded and sold three companies successfully and was recognized four times as a Fast 50 award recipient for business growth.

The topics that we’re going to cover are super interesting for all of our entrepreneurs and business owners. First and foremost, it’s working with simple numbers. By the way, it’s not as simple as it sounds, looks, or something like that. Read this because simple numbers are a program and a technique for operating your business. We’re also going to talk about what your ROI is on your business, the money that you’re investing in the business, how you should be looking at, what you are getting out of it, putting together the best financial dashboard for your business, and also creating predictive KPIs in your business.

You’re looking forward and not just looking backward. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Jarrod Guy Randolph. I am the founder of BoxFi. We are the nation’s leading payment consultant, and providing business growth solutions through payment processing. I am very excited to share the network that I have built over my many years entrepreneurial journey to help you grow your business and become more profitable. Folks, let’s accelerate together.

David Worrell, thank you for joining us on the show.

My pleasure to be here.

Scaling Businesses: A Model For Success

I am very excited to have you because we’re going to talk about running your business successfully, fractional CFOs and what they can do to enhance and take your business to the next level. Before we do all of that, we have something far more important to discuss. You, yourself, are a very successful businessman and you have scaled three businesses and exited. Talk us through how you were able to replicate that model of scale successfully in three different businesses and how that’s informed what you’re doing working with other business owners.

Thank you. First, I’d say success is relative. I have a lot of friends who are way more successful than I am and have scaled much larger than I have, but I have had 3 or 4 businesses. Typically, I get up to 10 or 15 or 20 employees before I personally feel completely overwhelmed and have to pull the parachute cord. I think one lesson I’ve learned along the way is Jim Collins’ Good to Great. It said, “Think of who. Not how.” Every time I’ve wanted to do something that’s a little bit outside my comfort zone, I’m always tempted to go do it.

That’s fun, to live on the edge and learn something new. Ultimately, it’s not scalable. If you want to build a business and scale, you have to get right up to the edge of your comfort zone and then you got to call an expert. Being willing to find the who to do something new for you, versus taking six months off of your life to go learn how to do something is a powerful lesson for me. As a lot of entrepreneurs, I’m not a great delegator. I like to keep my fingers in everything, but Who Not How has been a powerful lesson for me.

I’m looking at the book Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. I don’t know if it was the gentleman who wrote Good to Great came up with that concept first, or if it was Dan, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is, is Dan Sullivan took Who Not How to the next level in terms of he didn’t even write the book. It was Benjamin Hardy, his business partner, who he employed to write the book.

Starting FuseCFO: Integrating Financial Success For Clients

He literally went out and found somebody who truly was an expert at communications through writing and wrote something that was incredibly successful and, to your point, all about bringing in the right people. We’re talking about bringing in the right people. Let’s talk about why you started Fuse CFO, Fuse Financial Group, why you started the company, and how you integrate into the existing platforms for the clients that you work with to help them achieve the success that they’re looking to achieve.

To be honest, there were four of us at the beginning years ago and we were all middle-aged guys out of various aspects of accounting and corporate work. We thought that we could go out and be high-paid fractional CFOs. That was the cool buzzword years ago. It’s still a buzzword. I remember one of our very first clients, it was a $40 million or $50 million agricultural company. They had fields full of tomatoes and peppers.

We were standing on the processing floor. They were putting peppers into boxes and bags and distributing them all over the country. It’s a very cool business. We said, “It looks like you got a great business here. Can we see your financial statements?” They wrung their hands and they called somebody who called somebody and they brought out this financial statement. The P&L by itself was like fifteen pages long. It was forever. It was way more information than they could ever digest. We said, “That’s a P&L. I can see where you at least got to start. How about the balance sheet?”

Their eyes got wide and said, “We don’t have a balance sheet. We’re not that big of a company.” I said, “Every company has a balance sheet. It theoretically exists. If you have $1 in the bank, you have a balance sheet.” Our first pivot was we cannot be smart strategic CFOs if our clients can’t produce basic financial statements. We learned early on that entrepreneurs are doers and they’re not accountants. We need to show up as an outsourced finance department and outsourced accounting department and bring bookkeepers, clerks, controllers, and CPAs, then you build this rock-solid foundation of financial reporting and financial statements.

You can do the cool strategic stuff and make cool life-changing decisions in your business about when to buy your building or when to hire ten more people or how to put a fleet together. Whatever your big decisions are relies on solid accounting basics. Somewhere in all of that was our reason to both do and teach entrepreneurs about how important finance is and how they can use it as an additional quiver in their arrow to make their business more successful.

Let’s talk about the teaching aspect because I think that’s important. What we do with our show for our business owner and entrepreneur audience, we try to provide some type of foundation of knowledge of how they should be looking at operating their business from a financial standpoint. What are some of the key components when you go into a business and you’re going to educate them on how they streamline systems, get to the next level, and make those buying decisions or those decisions to hire new employees? How do you go about it? What does your process look like?

I love a good dashboard, frankly. Internally, we’ve adopted a program called Simple Numbers. There are lots of dashboard-y things. There’s profit first, EOS, OKRs, and KPIs. Anyway, we like this one called Simple Numbers developed by a CPA in Georgia named Greg Crabtree. I’ve spoken personally with Greg a number of times and I just like the way he thinks about business. He says, “No matter what business you’re in, people are probably your largest expense, payroll.”

If you can make those people as efficient as possible, your business is going to be efficient. Your business is going to grow. You need to measure and know how well you are training your people, whether the tools they have are right, and if they are empowered to make the kinds of decisions and snap judgments that are going to make your company more profitable and more sustainable. We use Simple Numbers. The name of the metric is called the Direct Labor Efficiency Ratio. The other side of that is the management labor efficiency ratio.

The third thing is a return on invested cash, meaning the entrepreneur needs to know whether he’s getting a good return on his investment in the business. Between those three things, we end up with a very powerful way to talk about your business to see what’s going on. It’s not an MRI scan of your business. It’s taking your temperature and your blood pressure and saying, “I think we have a problem over here. Let’s talk about that more deeply.” It almost always points you in the right direction for a great strategic discussion.

Building Employee Culture For Maximized Value

If you’re looking at creating those efficiencies with your employees, and this is a bit outside of the financial spectrum. What do you see the most successful businesses doing to build an employee culture where there is communication and collaboration so each employee is maximizing their value?

First of all, I’m thrilled that you said the words culture and communication because that’s what being a small business guy is all about. You’re never going to get people to love coming to work and to do great things for their customers if you’re not making it a place that they can love and doing great things for them. I consider my role to be chief culture officer. That involves everything from regular recognition.

My dad used to call them Attaboys, or you just call somebody up and say, “Attaboy. You’re doing a great job. Let me send you a $50 Amazon card because I love the way you handled that customer problem.” We’re all virtual now, which has made culture much more difficult. We have in-person quarterly or semi-annual meetings. We nurture the relationship between our staff members. We’ve said something interesting, which is within the six key values that we have. We’ve got the letter V. It spells out THRIVE. The letter V stands for vulnerability, which is to say, be willing to raise your hand and say, “I don’t know something.”

When you’re on a team of 8 or 10 smart people, somebody else is going to know and is going to keep you from thrashing around and wasting a lot of time and becoming frustrated. Anyway, core values is one super strong key to developing a great culture. One of those values that’s often overlooked is encouraging the team to come together to help each other in meaningful ways. We do that through the vulnerability aspect.

I’m going to put you on the spot since you said that it was six things and it spells out THRIVE. Walk me through what your company culture is based around for each one of those letters for the acronym.

T for teamwork. We didn’t use to have THRIVE. We used to just call it teamwork, but that was a little confusing. Now teamwork is being willing to help someone else. That’s the flip side of vulnerability, which is asking for help. H for high tech or high touch. The world is not getting any less tech-centric. It’s not becoming any simpler. The more that we can deploy technology to solve customer problems, the more accurate and quickly we’re going to get our job done and the more time than we have to spend with our customers doing the important and valuable stuff of being that educator, teacher, confidant, and counselor.

I got that from the ‘90s in Silicon Valley, if any of your readers are that old. R is Responsiveness. That just means that when a customer calls, you have 24 hours to call them back even if the answer is, “I’ll get back to you later.” E is Excellence. You have to do a great job. I is Integrity, because you cannot be an accountant handling anybody else’s money without being honest and having deep personal integrity. That’s just table stakes for working with somebody else’s money.

Integrating Core Values Into Business Success

It’s incredibly important to have that integrity. You worked with a lot of businesses. I’d love to hear how you take your core values and incorporate into educating and helping this business get to the next level. You worked with a lot of businesses to get to the next level. You’re working with a lot of businesses I believe that is a million to $10 million in annual revenue. Not all of them. What challenges do you see them facing? Are they the same through that spectrum or is it very different for a company that’s in a million versus $10 million? How do you overcome that?

The folks that are attracted to us and the people that are our ideal customers have very similar problems. They are fantastic operators. They’re doctors who know how to heal people. They’re bakers who know how to make cakes. They’re software guys. We have a lot of tech companies and filmmakers. They make a great product. They’re operators. You would never expect everybody to be great accountants or bookkeepers or CFOs. They’re great operators. They need to understand finance just a deep enough level that they can make terrific decisions.

They don’t want to be an accountant. They would go back to school for that. They don’t want to be a bookkeeper. They pay other people to do that. They need to understand the finances well enough or, let’s call it the financial results well enough to make hard decisions. That doesn’t mean they need to understand debits and credits. Nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to worry about whether your receipt for gasoline goes into travel expenses or automobile. Forget all that.

They need to understand after all of that is done, how do you make decisions from the resulting information that comes out? We often describe our role as a black box. We want to be the accounting department inside a black box. You don’t have to worry about it. When you come to Fuse, you get worry-free accounting. What comes out of the box gives us a chance to have deep, meaningful, educational, and insightful discussions about your business.

Jarrod, are you getting a return on your investment in your business better than you would get in the stock market? Are you taking home enough money to be happy? Should you buy a fancy new sports car this year so you can write it off on your taxes? Some people have other problems. They have too much money. We like to focus on the financial results and teach people how to run the business based on that.

You’ve talked about twice now the return on investment for the operator. How are you defining that? Is that money just going into the business? There may be a parallel between what you’re paying your employees and the return you’re getting out of the success that they’re having. How do you define that for the business owners that you’re working with?

Good question. The return you’re getting for what you pay your employees is called the direct labor efficiency ratio. That’s the first part of Simple Numbers. The return on invested cash, without diving too deep into the math here, let’s say that you make lemonade and you sell lemonade in a lemonade stand. You are invested in inventory. You’ve got money tied up in your inventory and operating expenses each month. Before maybe you pretend that you bill free your lemonade and you get paid at the end of the month like most of us do.

You’ve got money tied up in your accounts receivable. While you’re waiting to get paid, you’ve got money tied up in things like operating expenses and wages. This formula is in Simple Numbers, it’s not all that complicated, but it adds up. All of the cash that it took you, the founder, to invest in your company to get it started and keep it running. For any folks who are into this, that’s called the Cash Cycle. I have lots of videos about the cash cycle and we can talk about AR and AP days outstanding.

Anyway, there’s a number I can put on to tell you how much cash you have invested in your business. You compare that very simply to the amount of profit you make each year. I’ve got about $150,000 invested in Fuse. If I make $150,000 profit each year, which is not out of reach, I’ve got a 100% return on capital. I made 8% in 2024. It was a pretty good year in the stock market, but most years in the stock market, you make an average of 6% or 8% or maybe 10% in the stock market. We’re talking about the average return on invested capital for an entrepreneur who knows how to run his business, who’s got a called a flywheel going. He’s got a good operating business. It’s 50% to 150% per year every year.

That makes you stop and think about, “I got an extra $5,000 at the end of this month. Should I bring it home and redecorate the living room or should I reinvest it in the company? If I can make 150% on that every year, then that $5,000 turns into $7,500 this year and $7,500 next year, and $7,500 the year after that.” The trick is you have to know where to invest it. That requires a little more thought and discussion.

Leveraging Community Engagement For Business Growth

Let’s talk a little bit before we move on to talking about managing your numbers and financial accuracy. Some of the work that you’ve done within the entrepreneurial community in Charlotte, North Carolina, and how you’ve leveraged that network of giving back into building the success that you have now. The reason I’m asking is because I think business owners, from what I see, downplay the important of being part of the community of giving back and integrating into their network into what they do to help build their business.

I agree. Too many of us get stuck inside our bubbles. Now, that we can work remotely, we literally get stuck inside our homes, and we don’t go out enough. I just love what I do. In particular, I love that, we call it the zone of inspiration or genius. For me, it’s teaching people about enough about their business that they can use the numbers to operate. I volunteered at 3 or 4 accelerators that are in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I live.

Many of them deal with what we call minority and traditionally underserved entrepreneurs. Some of them are focused on women who are transitioning out of corporate careers and starting their first businesses. I love going into these classroom environments and teaching that. It does a couple of things for me. First of all, it’s rewarding. I would do it if I were retired. Secondly, not only are you networking with people who might one day become your customers, those students that you’re teaching.

To me, you’re elevating yourself. Putting yourself out there as a thought leader and you’re building networks with the other people who are teaching and the people who are running those incubators. I know some of the most active and most successful business people in town simply because I volunteered a few hours a week to go teach at an incubator where they have also invested their time, energy, and resources to be at.

We end up sitting on boards together, being in meetings, and trying to solve problems for this particular entrepreneur together. It’s very bonding and it always results in long-term growth. Not just personal growth. I certainly learn a lot, but it also ends up resulting in long-term business growth because people know you, like you, trust you, recognize you as an expert, and call you.

It’s a concept that I like to call buying favor. It’s like buying favor. Not to get religious, but it’s like buying favor in the eyes of God was where you might have heard that in context. For me, what I’ve realized is the more I give back to the community, to others, and the more I add value, they want to add value in return. What we don’t recognize is that it’s normally one phone call away.

That next client or that next opportunity is one meeting away or one dinner or one volunteer session away. Getting integrated with your community to grow your business is so important. It might seem as if it’s an intangible, but it’s not. It is super tangible from the examples that you gave on how you’ve ended up on boards, done business together, developed relationships, and picked up clients. You have to do this. It’s important.

I moved from Charlotte to Asheville, by the way. That’s a whole story about Hurricane Helene and I won’t go there, but I’m feeling like I’m on an island. I have got to start rebuilding my network in the Asheville locale, reaching out, and meeting some people. I still have to drive back to Charlotte to do that, which is fine. I’m just feeling lonely in Asheville.

I’m going to plug this book. I don’t mean to be plugging it, but I reviewed it for my Sunday book review that I do online. I’ll tell you the biggest takeaway for me from the book was she talked about adults, how adults build relationships, and how when we’re younger and when we’re in school, we have our tribes because from grade school to high school, we graduate. We travel along that journey typically with the same people unless you move. You go to college and then you start to see that separation happen.

People go in different directions, pick different career paths, and create different communities. It is tough for adults to create those relationships. You have to put in an effort. When you’re at your coffee shop, say hello to the people that you see there consistently. She talked about one example where she ended up talking to a couple who had a young child. She saw him at the coffee shop every day in this little tiny town that she moved to after living in Boston for years. She come to find out one of them was a psychologist on mindset and the other one was a podcast production company director.

That’s literally what Mel Robbins does. She’s like, “Six months into seeing them at the coffee shop every other day, I realized that there was massive synergy.” She built an awesome friendship with them. Get out there and have those conversations. She also talked about how it’s geographical. As adults, if you’re not in front of somebody, it’s tough to keep that relationship with a friend the same way you’re used to that no longer lives next door and they’re five states away. Even if it’s some towns away, you can be in the same state and feel different. Get out there and make those connections that’ll help build.

Business Finances: We can’t be smart strategic CFOs if our clients can’t produce basic financial statements.

Nothing happens until you get away from your desk and you get out of the community. It’s one thing to hang out on Zoom calls and Facebook groups. It’s something completely different to be in person, face to face with 1 or 10, or 100 people at a mixer in your city. There’s nothing like it. I tell my sales guys the same thing and they don’t believe me until they try it. They’re like, “I made a sale.”

Improving Cash Flow For Business Longevity

Let’s talk a little bit more about some of the nitty-gritty stuff and let’s dive into cashflow. Cashflow is one of the biggest reasons and the main reasons that businesses fail. Talk to me about ways that you can be creative to improve your cashflow as a business owner and how you educate business owners to do so.

First, I got to tell a little story about myself. I’m almost embarrassed to tell you this, but there was a time when I had a big client leave. I just wasn’t managing very well. At the end of that year, I had made a total revenue of like $600,000 or $700,000 in my business. We were still ramping up, trying to get started, and struggling. I had to write off $150,000 of bad debt that year. It was like a knife to the heart. That was 20% of my revenue.

I thought of it as two and a half months’ worth of work flushed down the toilet. I swore to myself I would never write off bad debt again. I will do anything that it takes to not have bad debt and to improve my cashflow to the point where I can take home more money. I think this is a fine point that a lot of entrepreneurs miss. When you improve your cashflow, there’s more cash in the bank for you to take home at the end of each month.

If a business goes from 60 days terms on their invoices to 30 days terms, you’ve increased the amount of cash in the bank by an entire month’s worth of billing. For me, that’s $100,000. If there’s an extra $100,000 in my bank account at any given time, how happy are you and how much easier does that make your whole life? Here’s a couple of quick tips. Number one, have a good process in your proposals to your customers. My proposal now includes an ACH form. If you don’t want to pay me by ACH on the tenth day following my invoice, you are not my customer. I’m sorry.

Number two, when you onboard that customer, make sure that the invoices are going to the right person and communicating with not just the decision maker, but also the check writer, that you’ve given them all the information they need like a W-9 form, bank and routing information if they’re going to pay you by ACH. I prefer to literally pull the ACH out of your account and take your money for my bill, but occasionally it goes the other direction.

Don’t let it go too long. When you have a collections problem back to Who Not How, send it to a collections agency. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Work with them professionally, over-communicate, and get them to commit to paying it but don’t wait more than 60 days to try to save a friendship. You’ve got to get paid and a collections agency will do that a lot more proficiently than you will.

That’s sage advice. Those are some things that I have not heard. I love the ACH form and getting paid on day ten. If they’re not paying you on day ten, they’re not your customer because you can afford to float someone else’s business. That truly is key.

By day ten, I’ve already floated their business for 40 days. I’ve paid my employee to work for them for 40 days. I’m not a scavving agency.

I didn’t even think about that because you’ve got the work that goes into it. The thirty days, plus an extra ten days. The efficiency of collecting that money is tantamount to success for your business. That’s awesome.

There are a lot of aspects to cashflow. You could talk about limiting your inventory or paying your bills more slowly or negotiating for terms with your creditors. For me, it was always about collections because I was sick and tired of sending an invoice and not getting paid, then realizing I had the wrong customer and I was never going to get paid and I just got to write it off.

That is 100% rough. You mentioned something, and I’m assuming what we discussed may be on this, but I’d love you to walk me through what a quality dashboard or a quality financial dashboard looks like for a business owner.

I always start with the Simple Numbers dashboard. That’s those 3 or 4 metrics we talked about, labor efficiency, management efficiency, and return on capital. Those are things that are measured right out of your financial statements. The problem with that is, all of those are what we call trailing indicators. They tell me what happened last month. I can come to you and I can say, “Jarrod, you’ve got twelve employees and their efficiency is dropping down. What’s going on? Did you guys have more vacation time or too many meetings? Maybe you’re not giving them good enough tools to do their job.” It’s a trailing indicator.

What you want your dashboards to focus on is predictive indicators or leading indicators, they call them. A good KPI, Key Performance Indicator, is something that looks into the future. The easiest one to think about is, let’s take the example, I have a client who sells hubcaps on a website. It sounds like a simple business, but what he’s got to keep an eye on every week is the number of people who visit his website.

He knows before you can buy a hubcap, you’ve got to click through and before you can click through, you got to visit the website. It’s the top of the sales funnel. The number of visits he can get, or maybe you could look at, where do I rank on Google, or how many people searched for my term, or what is the price of rice in China? Whatever it is that you can say drives my business, that is a top of the funnel leading indicator. Keeping an eye on that is one of the most important things. Identify as many of those KPIs or leading indicators as you can.

Look at efficiency metrics and other metrics that are specific for your industry. If you’re in the retail industry, let’s say you have a bricks-and-mortar storefront and you’re selling candles. The numbers that retailers need to watch are things like, how many cars drive past my strip mall on any given day? The city knows that number. The county counts how many cars at least once a year. They go through it and they do an audit of where is all the traffic. You can find out how many cars pass by. Maybe you want to be a little more specific, how many people came into my store?

That’s a pretty cool leading indicator. You get into the specific industry metrics like, “What’s my dollars per square foot?” “I have a thousand square foot store. Can I sell a million dollars a year?” If so, I need to be doing a thousand dollars per square foot. On a monthly basis, that’s $80 per square foot. Now you know how much you need to sell for each square foot in your store. The last thing that I almost always insist every entrepreneur keeps track of is my breakeven number.

I can talk forever about breakeven number, but if you don’t know what your breakeven number is, and by the way, it’s a super simple formula, total overhead cost divided by gross margin is a percentage of sales overhead divided by GM percentage. Setting the math aside, if your break even, now you’ve got a real tangible target to shoot for. You’ve got to get out of bed every morning and sell X number of widgets or Y number of service hours just to keep the lights on. You don’t go home for dinner until you’ve sold that many and a little bit more because you don’t want to just break even in this business.

You want to make some money. I’m going off in tangent but my last tangent is make sure that in your forecast and in your breakeven calculation, you’ve included salary for yourself. Many entrepreneurs forget to pay themselves or forget to budget to pay themselves. A breakeven is not a breakeven if the CEO has not taken home a salary. Add your CEO salary first, then calculate your breakeven and then wake up every morning and hit that goal.

Why was there this mindset of not paying yourself or paying yourself last as an entrepreneur? Where did that come from?

It’s terrible head trash. “I’m not worthy.” “I’m stupid.” “I’m an imposter.” “I’m not good enough.” “I’m not as smart as the next guy.” We all have it. It’s just part of being human. I’ve had it worse than any part of the times in my life. You’ve got to plow through all of that head trash and start believing that maybe it’s your wife or your dog and cat that like to eat good food or need a surgery or something.

You’ve got to admit to yourself, “It costs me X to live the life that I want.” Maybe compare it to if you had a real job. You’ve come out of corporate America. You were used to make $75 or $175,000, whatever it was, start there. “I’ve got to replace my salary or I got to feed myself.” “I want to go to Europe twice a year.” Set a budget. That’s what you’ve got to earn.

Business Finances: When you improve your cash flow, there’s more cash in the bank for you to take home at the end of each month.

I don’t necessarily think that majority of our audience, business owners, and entrepreneurs suffer this, but it used to be. I remember hearing this earlier on in my career, and it felt wrong to me to hear a wealthy investor say, “You should take as little as you possibly can, or you shouldn’t pay yourself. All the money should be going to the business.” That’s easy for you to say. It’s also easy to say for you to say when it’s not your check. That’s family money and generationally. You’ve never understood what it was to have that work to freaking pay bills.

If your CEO is starving, they cannot function at their best. I learned from some of the clients that I had years ago back in the real estate world sales side. Take a Goldman Sachs, for instance. Their executives were always in a black car driving around New York. It had nothing to do with pomp and circumstance. It wasn’t because they were going to yoga class. It was because every minute cost them money. You cannot have an executive in a subway missing a phone call or to have an executive have to wait to get into coach, versus flying first class. They sit you down, get your drink, and hook up the internet. You start working before you even take off because you’re not standing around waiting another 45 minutes.

They were calculating down to the minute how much they were losing by not doing those things. They afforded their executives certain things and a lot of their management, their mid-level, and senior management. There’s been this odd mentality when you’re a startup business that you shouldn’t get paid. I’m sorry, if you are hungry and not sleeping well, you’re not thinking 100%. It’s going to take you that much longer to build a true successful business.

I negotiated venture capital deals in Silicon Valley back in the first dot-com boom in the late ‘90s. I remember hearing that a lot, but it was also two-sided. Most of the VCs or angels that I knew would say, “I want to pay you enough that you don’t have to worry about things. You’re not worried about your rent or starvation or where you’re going to sleep, but not so much that you get fat and lazy and happy.” We’ve got to keep you hungry.

When it’s their money that’s becoming your salary, I think they have a right to say that. When you’re not big venture funded startup, but let’s say you’re a two-year-old borderline lifestyle business, an insurance agent or a dog walker or an ice cream shop or a software company. I love these SaaS companies that are all over the place now. When you’re a SaaS company and you’re building something, if you’re not putting 100% into it at the beginning, you’re probably cheating yourself. Very soon, you’ve got a budget and figure out, how am I going to take that money home because nobody can live on air.

Integrating AI Into Business Operations

How are you advising your clients to look at integrating AI into their operations of their businesses?

That is so hard. I know it’s going to change every day and probably by the time you put this interview on the web, it will be completely different again. I don’t see AI working in the niche businesses. For example, as an accountant, I know that there are AI based products that can do certain things and they help a little bit. It’s not to the point where you just say, “Siri, please file my taxes for me,” or you touch your watch and you say, “Reconcile my bank account.” We’re not quite there yet.

People like to think we are, and I know that’s where we’re headed. You’ve got to be watching it, but we all need to be aware at this point. It’s possible that you go too far down that rabbit hole and you get lost. Number one, there are a million companies that call themselves AI companies like there were a million companies in 1999 that called themselves dot-coms. I’m old enough to have lived through and I saw what happened to pets.com and home.com and all these things that lasted about six months, blew through a bunch of money and then went away.

If you’ve invested the last three months in learning some AI tool that you think is cool, I cannot guarantee it’s going to be around in three more months. Things could change so radically and I’ve seen it happen. I’m using the tools that are integrated into big software platforms that already exist. I’m trying not to use the little tiny niche things that do 1 or 2 things well. Even though they’re super cool, I want to learn about them. I just don’t want to make them part of my critical path because for me, until Intuit puts it into QuickBooks, it’s probably not going to be something I can count on sticking around for the long-term.

Are you seeing AI creating efficiencies in the accounting arena, though?

I’ve had people tell me it’s true, but I’m skeptical for now. I’m keeping my eye on it. I’m trying to learn as much as I can and watch as many tools. I know a lot of tools. I just don’t see like where’s the beef? Now I’m not giving away my age. I don’t see the meat on the bone yet.

Very interesting. From a marketing standpoint, AI has been incredible. There are certain things like when it comes to sales that you still have to have that human connection. It’s created a ton of efficiencies. Even for instance, running a show the way that we’ve been doing it. There’s no way I would have been able to do this in 2024, the efficiencies that AI has created. It allows me to do things like connect with wonderful people like you to have you on our show.

Jarrod, I have something on my calendar that says, “How to create and run a podcast entirely on AI.” From start to finish, it’s an entire AI. There are no real people. I might have to ask you, “Can you prove you’re real?”

I was going to say, “I am a robot. I am not real.” I wish that you could, and maybe you can. Maybe I’m just not that proficient. I’ve learned to communicate very well and have a conversation with AI. Here’s the thing that people don’t understand. AI is not a technology. It’s an intelligence, but what you get out of AI is only as good as your input. The output is only as good as the input, so if you don’t learn to communicate with it, and that’s what I’m focused on.

Change the business that I’m in on the payment processing and merchants’ service business. To your point, it’s still not there. There’s more that has to go because there’s so much nuance. One of the problems is, if I create a clone of myself and it has all my knowledge, merchant services, aims at processing and I say to a merchant or talk to my clone. They don’t know what questions to ask. They don’t know the inefficiencies in their system or how to communicate it properly to get the right answer.

AI does a good job, but it’s not perfect and it’s not replacing the human being yet. Some businesses say it’s going to replace human beings or it’s going to make human beings more efficient. That’s what the hope is, or allow them to again develop soft skills because those soft skills like selling human to human, are going to be very important moving forward as we see more progress with AI.

I love using AI. It’s a language tool. LLM, Large Language Models. It works with words. It’s much better than numbers. In my world, you can appreciate it. In fact, my whole team, I insist that they use AI to help them write emails. You can imagine accountants are not great word people, but I’ll say if you’re struggling, put in an AI. Let AI write the thing, even if you copy and paste a little bit. We’re good with that.

I’d rather you be clear, concise, and robust in your communication rather than screw something up. We do use it for a lot of language tasks. I love it for writing blogs, reports, and due diligence on businesses that are being bought and sold. I get involved in a lot of M&A. I can upload a 300-page PDF document or 300 different PDF documents for due diligence on a merger transaction and start asking you very specific questions. It’s just fantastic for that stuff.

Global Trends In Finance And Accounting Business Owners Should Know

It truly is. Before we get into the rapid-fire section, there’s one more question that I want to ask you because I think this is important because of your background and the success you’ve had. You were named to Intuit’s 100 Global Influencers in Accounting and Finance. You have a more global, pun-intended perspective on the industry. What are some of the trends in financing and accountant you think business owners should be paying attention to in this market?

We covered AI but certainly, you’ve got to have an eye on that. Technology in general is just getting cool. There are some amazing tools. I like to use Ramp. It’s a credit card that a lot of folks understand and already use. It’s an entirely different way of looking at expense management and issuing credit cards to your employees. There’s so much FinTech, we call it, financial technology and FinTech software.

I’ve got one called Finatical Software that gives you a connection between Excel and QuickBooks online. You can build models in Excel that reference your real-time QuickBooks data. It’s just fantastic. 1) Technology. 2) Keep an eye on AI. 3) We already see more and more fraud in the finance business. If you are an entrepreneur who is not keeping up, if you’re writing paper checks, you are hugely susceptible to fraud. If your employees are not well trained on cyber fraud and cyberattacks, you’re going to pay dearly.

That’s one of the things that scares me the most, especially about AI as the bad actors begin adopting AI. It makes them just as much more powerful as would you. We’re in a bit of an arms race and I almost got suckered into a scam. They’re getting so good. I had to check, squint, recheck, and call somebody before I said, “This cannot be real.” It wasn’t. I saved myself $500 that they were trying to scam me out of. It took me a second to figure it out. Whereas 3 years or 4 years or 5 years ago, you’d be like, “This guy didn’t spell the word right. His email address was wrong. The colors are off. It’s a obviously a scam.” It’s not so obvious anymore. It’s hard.

Rapid Fire Questions With David Worrell

That is very true. It is time for the rapid-fire section. Are you ready to go?

I guess so.

Coffee or tea?

I’m a coffee guy. Black coffee and white boards. I’m all about that.

It’s a zombie apocalypse. You’ve got to get out of your house and protect your family. What is your weapon of choice?

If I can have any weapon I want, I mean nuclear bomb or something. A flamethrower sounds like fun.

That is my answer. You’re the only other person who has set a flamethrower. I’ve got a lot of guests. Great mind’s think alike.

You don’t have to be very accurate with a flamethrower. It’s broad and also fun.

Do you have a favorite phrase or quote that you think of often and use in business?

I shared with you already the Who Not How. I spoke to Elon Musk once dozens of years ago when he was still a cool business guy and not a politician. He said, “Hire slow, fire fast.” Which is not groundbreaking, but pretty darn important. Pay yourself first. That’s my favorite one.

Is there a book that you would recommend our audience read?

I wrote a book called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Financial Statements. You can find that on Amazon and at a lot of libraries. I also like the books on culture building, which we touched on earlier. There’s one called, Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work. Another is one called Leaders Eat Last. If you’re into Malcolm Gladwell’s science and psychology side of things, Leaders Eat Last is very cool. It talks about how the military builds its culture of leadership. If you’re not that a science sociology guy, then this Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work is much more fun. It talks about a small business and what toilet paper you buy for your employees’ office bathrooms. It’s every nitpicky detail.

What are three money-saving strategies that you have for 2025 you would suggest our business owners implement?

I don’t know if I can get to three. I usually do but number one, look at your credit card statement religiously every month because you never know what you’re going to find there. That’s where the rubber meets the road. As you’re looking at that, look for subscriptions. There was once I looked at my card and I realized I was paying for something like twelve licenses for Adobe Acrobat at $15 each.

Even though $100 a month might not seem like a lot to some people, over and over again, you’re not using those fifteen licenses. Cut it. It’s so easy to go sign up for new SaaS subscriptions. You got Adobe, Monday.com or whatever. Make sure that you’re turning those things off when you’re not using, or turning them off as fast as you’re turning a new one on as you upgrade. Also, money saving.

That one in particular is important because I had like somehow three different Apple subscriptions to the exact same thing upgraded, but they didn’t cancel the other ones. It was only an extra $80, but it’s ridiculous that it’s the same product that they didn’t tell me. That’s my own great Apple.

Back to our Who Not How, my third suggestion would be outsource it to a company like ERA. I’m not endorsing them. I don’t know them very well, but they’re a national firm expense reduction analyst. That’s both a company name and a general term for people who specialize in going in and helping you cut your overhead by holding your vendors accountable to contracts and agreements. They can cut all the fat out of things like phone bills and raw materials. Negotiate with your vendors. Be willing to ask because if you don’t ask for a discount or better terms, you’re certainly not going to get it.

Ask for a discount from your vendors. Otherwise, you’re not going to get it. That’s great. The last but not least question. Give me two people in your life who have helped you get to the level of success that you have in your business.

The first guy is an old mentor of mine who came out of Nabisco. His name is Bill Manby. God rest his soul. He passed about a dozen years ago, but I love Bill. When I first landed in California, I was 25 or 26 years old and Bill was 59 years old or 65 years old. He was the old wise guy with gray hair and I was the young buck with stars in my eyes. He would often tell me, “You got to go slow to go fast,” and silly stuff like, “Never let them see you sweat. Get a mentor.” For me, it was Bill Manby. The other one is my brother, Jim.

He and I have been in business on and off for a couple of iterations of our careers. He’s just a real go-getter. He’s a classic type-A entrepreneur. It was interesting to see how Jim doesn’t hesitate. He picks up the phone and calls somebody. “You got a question? Let’s call somebody.” Maybe now you do Google. Jim would pick up the phone and call somebody. He’s the guy who taught me you never make a sale until you get out from under your desk or get out from behind your desk and get out in the real world and make a sale.

David, please tell everyone where they can connect with you if they would like to do so.

I’m happy to. I’d love to have conversations with new people. The website is FuseCFO.com. There’s a page with my book on it. You can buy that on Amazon. David@FuseCFO.com is my direct email address. I welcome you there. I’ve got a very cool YouTube channel, if I do say so myself. I’m working hard on that. There are a lot of lessons. I tried to make them bite-sized. Some as short as 30 seconds and some more like 30 minutes. We’ve got a YouTube channel, YouTube.com/@FuseCFO, but if you search for Fuse CFO on YouTube, you’ll find it.

David Worrell, thank you for joining us on the show.

Thank you, Jarrod. It was a blast. I hope it leads to lots of success among your readers.

Important Links

• David Worrell on LinkedIn
• David@FuseCFO.com
• Fuse CFO
• Fuse CFO on YouTube
• Entrepreneur’s Guide to Financial Statements
• Intuit
• BoxFi
• Good to Great
• Who Not How
• Simple Numbers
• Ramp
• Finatical Software
• Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work
• Leaders Eat Last
• ERA

About David Worrell

Author of “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Financial Statements” and more than 300 other published works on Entrepreneurship and Finance, David Worrell will help you make better business decisions, take more effective action, and build a stronger, more profitable business. He is the go-to resource for entrepreneurs who are struggling with the financial clarity needed for better decision making.

And he connects with clients because he’s been in their shoes:  David has run 4 successful companies of his own, including innovative small firms in telecom and healthcare.  In 2013, David founded FuseCFO, an “outsourced accounting department”, where his team helps entrepreneurs with tough accounting and finance tasks.  Through FuseCFO, David is also available as a fractional CFO and consultant to entrepreneur-lead businesses.

David is a Certified Emerging Markets Credit Analyst from Moody’s Analytics and a platinum-level QuickBooks Pro Advisor.

Learn more about your business at http://www.FuseCFO.com and in his book, now available at Amazon.